World Wide Words -- 10 Aug 02
Michael Quinion
DoNotUse at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Aug 9 16:59:20 UTC 2002
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 302 Saturday 10 August 2002
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Editor: Michael Quinion, Thornbury, Bristol, UK ISSN 1470-1448
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Contents
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1. Feedback, notes and comments.
2. Turns of Phrase: Machinima.
3. Sic!
4. Weird Words: Sciolist.
5. Q&A: Dead cat bounce; Bumbershoot.
6. Over To you.
7. Endnote.
A. Subscription commands.
B. Contact addresses.
1. Feedback, notes and comments
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BELLS AND WHISTLES Following the piece three weeks ago, Ed Kemmick
has pointed out that the phrase - in inverted form - is in a song
by the American bluesman Blind Willie McTell, "Broke Down Engine
Blues No. 2", recorded in New York City in 1933. The relevant part
of the lyric is this:
Feel like a broke-down engine, mama,
ain't got no whistles or bells.
Feel like a broke-down engine, baby,
ain't got no whistles or bells.
If you're a real hot mama,
come take away Daddy's weeping spell.
This may just be an accidental similarity of usage, but I suspect
not. It does seem to show that at this date bells and whistles were
linked especially to railway locomotives.
SKUNK WORKS It was perhaps a little presumptuous of me to attempt
to explain such a cultural icon as Li'l Abner to an audience that
is about 70% American. Getting my facts wrong didn't help. The
comic strip was not set in upstate New York, but somewhere in the
Appalachians or Ozarks (perhaps Kentucky or Arkansas, though Al
Capp never made that clear).
MOGGADORED Several subscribers pointed out that a port in Morocco
was once called Mogador (it's now Essaouira), a name which comes
from a Berber word for a safe anchorage. The French navy bombarded
Mogador during that country's invasion of Morocco in 1844, but the
British weren't involved and the incident hardly merits a mention
even in detailed histories of North Africa, so it's unlikely that
there's a link. It's also the name of a village in Surrey, south of
London, but no event of any note seems ever to have happened there,
certainly none that might cause its name to be attached to a person
who is confused or at a loss.
2. Turns of Phrase: Machinima
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It used to be that the process of creating an animated film, even
digitally, required long hours of labour using specialised and
expensive software. Then moviemakers cottoned on to the potential
of the image-generating engines that exist inside animated computer
games such as Quake. Some games, especially Quake 3, allow the user
access to the underlying code to customise scenes or create new
ones. It didn't take long for audio-visual experts to spot their
potential for creating entirely new animated sequences. Films so
made have been around for several years, but the technique, and the
results, have begun to attract mainstream interest only recently.
"Mechanima" is usually said to be a blend of "machine" plus
"cinema"; the large number of Web sites in German that feature it
suggest the term may have been coined in that language.
Making digital movies is now as easy as playing PC games -
literally. A rising technique called machinima (machine and cinema)
uses software from common computer games to make animated films,
and upstart directors are flocking to the Web to learn it.
["Entertainment Weekly", June 2001]
Machinima movies, which range from short comedies to science-
fiction epics, are produced entirely on computers, eliminating the
need to buy costly equipment, rent spectacular locations or hire
glamorous actors. The films are then distributed free over the
Internet.
["New York Times", July 2002]
3. Sic!
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My discovery last month that "hiss" can in American speech be used
correctly of text with no sibilants in it (as in my example: "'Over
here,' he hissed") has been picked up by David Langford's "Ansible"
science-fiction newsletter (mainly because I sent it to him after
he, too, waggled his finger at an SF writer for using "hiss" like
that). In return I give you this from his current newsletter: "J K
ROWLING, in Czech translation, has the appropriate feminine suffix
added to her name: thus Harry Potter titles spotted in Prague
bookshops are, rather strikingly, by J K Rowlingova".
4. Weird Words: Sciolist /'sVI at lIst/
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A superficial pretender to knowledge.
Some dictionaries mark this word as archaic, and indeed it may be
so, since I can't find a recent example from a printed work. And it
was always in any case a scholarly or literary brickbat to throw at
a rival, one hardly likely to appear in your daily newspaper.
A typical example appears in an article by Thomas Henry Huxley in
the "Fortnightly Review" in 1878: "Judged strictly by the standard
of his own time, Bacon's ignorance of the progress which science
had up to that time made is only to be equalled by his insolence
toward men in comparison with whom he was the merest sciolist".
The word, as you might guess from the spelling, comes from Latin.
It derives from the verb "scire", to know, which is also the root
of other English words, like "prescient", "science", "omniscient"
and "conscience". The immediate Latin original was the diminutive
"sciolus", a person who had only a smattering of knowledge.
The related noun is "sciolism", the practice of giving one's
opinions on subjects of which one has only superficial knowledge.
That is a little more common, but the only recent example I've
turned up was written by the American author and playwright Herb
Greer in the "National Review" in 1998: "Tynan's awful political
sciolism sparks out now and again, but not offensively".
Store it in the back of your mind - you never know when it might
come in handy, simultaneously showing your own word power and your
opinion of your opponent. By the time he has found a sufficiently
large dictionary to discover you've insulted him, you can be well
away.
5. Q&A
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Q. I had never heard the phrase "dead cat bounce" before the recent
dips and dives on the world's stock markets, and then heard it
three times in one day, on various media reports. Presumably it
refers to a small improvement in the market's fortune, after a long
downward movement - even a dead cat dropped from a dizzy height may
bounce a little. Am I correct? And what is its origin? [Steven
Gruzd, South Africa]
A. It does indeed refer to a temporary recovery from a big drop in
a stock's price and the image evoked is just the one you give. The
term is part of the extraordinary jargon of the financial world;
the evidence strongly suggests that it originated on Wall Street. A
good example of the usage is this from 1995: "The nature of that
rally is going to be extremely important, because if it's just a
dead cat bounce, then I would say we were in for real trouble".
Paul McFedries found an early example of its use in one of his
WordSpy columns, from an Associated Press newswire piece dated
February 1986:
One of the most vivid, if a bit indelicate, word pictures
painted by the bears on oil comes from Raymond F. DeVoe Jr.
at the investment firm of Legg Mason Wood Walker. DeVoe
suggests the printing of a bumper sticker reading: "Beware
the Dead Cat Bounce." "This applies to stocks or commodities
that have gone into free-fall descent and then rallied
briefly," he says. "If you threw a dead cat off a 50-story
building, it might bounce when it hit the sidewalk. But
don't confuse that bounce with renewed life. It is still a
dead cat."
This may well be the first example extant: neither I nor the
researchers at the "Oxford English Dictionary" have found an
earlier one. The phrase gradually caught on during the 1990s but
has become especially common - for obvious reasons - in the past
couple of years.
-----------
Q. I recently heard an American use the word "bumbershoot" as a
humorous term for umbrella. I cannot find where and when it
originated. My dictionary says it is an Americanism, but some web
sites have said it was a British word for umbrella. The "chute"
part suggests it is recent, but it frequently is associated with
old folks, especially ones in the countryside. Any help? [David
Sinclair]
A. Any suggestion of a British origin can be immediately refuted.
It isn't known over here at all. In fact, I'd never heard of it
until you asked your question. So thank you for introducing me to
this lovely word.
It seems to have been yet another of those gloriously facetious
bits of wordplay so characteristic of America in the nineteenth
century. Quite how it came about is a matter of some guesswork, but
it looks moderately certain that the first part derives from the
beginning of "umbrella", with a "b" put in front so that it makes
the evocative and forceful first syllable "bum"; the second half,
as you surmise, is a respelling of the final syllable of
"parachute", presumably because of the similar shape.
Don't assume that any word derived from "parachute" must be at all
recent. Perhaps surprisingly, that word dates from the early days
of Montgolfier ballooning and first appeared in English in 1785.
("Umbrella" dates from the early seventeenth century, originally
from an Italian word for a sunshade, with the first part traceable
back to Latin "umbra", shadow.) The first example of "bumbershoot"
in Professor Lighter's "Random House Historical Dictionary of the
American Language" is from 1896. There were some variations around
in the early days, such as "bumbersol" (with "sol" presumably taken
from "parasol") and "bumberell". By the first decade of the
twentieth century it had settled down to "bumbershoot".
This fairly rare example of the word in print comes from L Frank
Baum's book "Sky Island" of 1912:
"This umbrella has been in our family years, an' years,
an' years. But it was tucked away up in our attic an'
no one ever used it 'cause it wasn't pretty." "Don't
blame 'em much," remarked Cap'n Bill, gazing at it
curiously. "It's a pretty old-lookin' bumbershoot."
These days, it's moderately uncommon, though still to be found. It
turns up most often in connection with the Seattle Arts Festival.
Bumbershoot was so named, I am told, because of that great city's
notoriously wet climate.
6. Over To you
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Maria Jessup Robinson asked "I am looking for an origin and meaning
of the phrase 'Appetite over tin cup'. Can you assist?". I've never
heard it, but there are a couple of examples online, one of which
says "To do any of these out of sequence is to go appetite over tin
cup". That looks like a facetious euphemism for "arse (ass) over
tit", meaning to go head over heels, literally or figuratively, in
part because it is reminiscent of "arse over tea kettle", another
expression of similar meaning. Can anybody confirm that and supply
examples of its use?
7. Endnote
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"In my youth there were words you couldn't say in front of a girl;
now you can't say 'girl'." [Tom Lehrer, in "The Oldie" (1996);
quoted in the "Oxford Dictionary of Thematic Quotations" (2000)]
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